GE, SAP Join Landis+Gyr in British Smart Meter Group

June 22 (Bloomberg) -- General Electric Co. and SAP AG
joined an alliance of companies including Landis+Gyr AG to
develop common standards for a U.K. smart-meter market that may
be worth 3.8 billion pounds ($6.2 billion) this decade.

Fairfield, Connecticut-based GE, Germany’s SAP, Logica Plc,
Trilliant Inc., Itron Inc. and Sensus USA Inc. joined the
alliance formed a year ago by Elster Group SE, Secure Meters
Ltd. and Landis+Gyr, according to an e-mailed statement from the
group. Toshiba Corp. of Japan agreed last month to buy
Landis+GYR for $2.3 billion.

The companies are developing a set of specifications that
will make their products compatible with each other as U.K.
companies work to meet a government goal to install 53 million
smart meters in homes and businesses by 2020.

“It’s the equivalent of your PC talking to your printer,
or several PCs talking back to one server to listen to your
iTunes,” Steve Cunningham, chief executive officer of
Landis+Gyr’s U.K. and Ireland unit, said in a phone interview.
“In the future, all your devices will know how to talk the
meter to know when the best tariff is.”

Smart meters are designed to tell consumers how much energy
they’re using and what the current tariff is. They can also
break down energy usage by appliance, helping customers regulate
their electricity and gas use, quantify electricity produced
from solar panels and on-house wind turbines, and communicate
information back to generators and grid operators.

The U.K. government’s Department of Energy and Climate
Change said in March that the country aims to roll out 53
million smart meters in the U.K.’s 30 million homes and
businesses by 2020 to cut electricity use and lower greenhouse
gas emissions. The government estimated the program will save
Britain 7.3 billion pounds over the next 20 years.

‘Real Proof’

“The major vendors are readying themselves to produce
products and solutions that are tailored to the U.K. market, the
largest deployment of gas and electric meters in the world,”
said Albert Cheung, lead analyst for energy smart technologies
at Bloomberg New Energy Finance. “GE’s arrival in the U.K.
smart metering market is well-timed.”

The alliance started out in July 2010 as three meter-makers. It now includes a “very broad coverage of the whole
smart grid environment,” including software developers and
companies that develop communications systems, Cunningham said.

“We’re trying to standardize the way the different pieces
in the U.K. smart metering environment need to talk to each
other,” he said. “Can you take an off-the-shelf SAP system and
make it work with a Landis+Gyr electricity meter, an Elster gas
meter, maybe an Itron in-home display and all connected with a
Trillian or a Sensus communications system? That will be the
real proof of what we’re working to deliver.”

U.K.’s Lead

New Energy Finance’s Cheung said there’s also a “great
deal of interest” in who will provide the centralized
communications network that will move the data. “Smart grid
specialists such as Trilliant, Sensus and Silver Spring Networks
could be in the running, but so are BT, Vodafone, O2 and other
telecoms specialists,” he said.

The companies’ products will still be differentiated,
providing for consumer choice, according to Cunningham, who
estimated the size of the household meter-market alone at 4.8
billion pounds between now and 2020. While countries including
Italy, Spain and Nordic nations have moved earlier to introduce
smart meters, the U.K. plan is more advanced, he said.

“As far as the next-generation smart metering deployment
goes, where you really are able to offer consumers real value
and advanced energy-management in the home, the U.K. is well in
the lead,” Cunningham said. “The solution we’re creating has
the potential to serve a lot of other markets too,” he said,
citing Europe, the Middle East, and the U.S.